There are plenty of explanations for the failure of the opinion polls to predict the outcome of Britain's General Election.
But the Conservative victory seems, in part, to vindicate the notion that, in politics, it's the economy stupid. The US election strategist, James Carville coined the phrase to describe the focus of his successful 1992 campaign to win the White House for Bill Clinton. In the UK a governing party which is seen by voters as economically competent and is presiding over a strong economy has historically enjoyed a powerful electoral advantage.
As we noted last week, the UK economy is seeing a decent recovery which, in the nick of time for the Conservatives, has started to lift consumer spending power.
For financial markets a Conservative majority has eased fears of political uncertainty and business-hostile policy change. The FTSE100 equity index closed up 2.4% on Friday and sterling saw its largest one-day rise against the dollar in five years.
In the last six months the Deloitte CFO Survey has provided strong evidence that political risk had started to dampen the animal spirits of the corporate sector. The unexpectedly clear election result may bolster business sentiment and risk appetite in the coming months.
But, as this weekend's wall-to-wall news coverage makes clear, UK political risk has been reduced, not eliminated.
The Conservative majority, at 12 seats, is vulnerable to events. John Major won the 1992 election for the Conservatives with a majority of 21 seats. But subsequent defections, by-election defeats and rebellions over Europe had, by 1997, turned the majority into a minority.
Last September's 'no' vote to Scottish independence seemed, for a time, to have settled the issue for a generation. The SNP landslide in Scotland puts the future of the Union back at the heart of the political debate.
But Europe poses perhaps the most immediate challenge.
Mr Cameron is committed to holding a referendum on EU membership within two years. A narrow Conservative majority and the reopening of the European issues have revived memories of the fratricidal infighting over Europe that characterised the John Major years. This time much depends on whether more Eurosceptic Conservative MPs judge that Mr Cameron has been successful in his bid to repatriate powers from Brussels to Westminster.
The most business-friendly outcome would be a renegotiation which was widely seen as addressing British concerns followed by a referendum campaign in which the great majority of Conservative MPs, along with all parties other than UKIP, campaigned for, and won, a yes vote.
The new Government has a second mountain to climb in the form of cutting public borrowing. The Conservative's ambitious target is to eliminate the budget deficit, currently equivalent to about 5.0% of GDP, by 2018/19.
More than half of the planned savings are due to come from as yet unspecified reductions in welfare spending and similarly unspecified anti-tax avoidance measures. Outside health, education and overseas aid, departmental spending faces huge real cuts of 12% in the next two years. Having vowed, during the election campaign, not to raise VAT, the main rates of income tax or National Insurance, the scope for tax rises is limited.
Over the weekend the Financial Times reported colleagues of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Mr Osborne, as saying that he will deliver his second budget of 2015 "relatively soon".
But the scale of the necessary consolidation may prove unattainable for a government with a narrow Parliamentary majority facing an array of austerity-sceptic parties. Austerity is unlikely to be derailed, but it may well be delayed, with deficit-reduction quite possibly extending into the next Parliament.
So the outcome of the General Election has eliminated a number of unsettling risks for markets and for business. But it has also opened up new ones, above all, on EU membership.
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